Cognitive and institutional barriers to effective natural resource management under global change

Abstract Many of the most challenging decisions facing natural resource managers today can be understood as time dependent. The concept of time‐dependent decisions is useful when considering natural resource management decisions that are characterized by nonstationarity in the underlying ecological system, uncertainty surrounding key ecological relationships, efficacy of management interventions, and difficult trade‐offs between the present and the future. In a time‐dependent decision, the optimal action changes depending on when the decision is made. We surveyed literature from the fields of cognitive psychology, environmental decision‐making, and natural resource management to identify a key set of cognitive and institutional barriers that prevent decision makers from recognizing their decisions as time dependent. This failure obscures the complexity of nonstationarity, uncertainty, and intertemporal choice in natural resource management and facilitates assumptions of stationarity and time independence. We used land acquisition in the context of climate change as an example to explore the barriers to effective time‐dependent decision‐making at both individual and institutional scales. Using a theoretical model of land acquisition, we quantified the value of accounting for time dependence by comparing the performance of time‐dependent, nonstationary decision models with models that assume time independence and stationarity. We found that the conservation value of land acquisition decisions was significantly improved through the use of time‐dependent optimization models and that this improvement increased as nonstationarity increased. Finally, explicitly recognizing the time dependence of many natural resource management decisions will help improve the utility of existing decision tools and frameworks.